Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble has never played by
anyone else’s rules. In the group’s first production, 2013’s stark and
disquieting adaptation of Richard III, actors slid tables at each other like torpedoes and wielded umbrellas like guns. Last fall’s Song of the Dodo
featured preening performers dressed as the titular bird, lots of
animalistic wailing, and—in one of the grossest and most enthralling
things I’ve seen on stage—Rebecca Lingafelter biting down on a raw egg
and chasing it with a glass of red wine.

From the time you enter the theater for this production of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters,
there’s no worry PETE has abandoned its rule book. The show has the
company’s visceral, iconoclastic stamp all over it, from the inventive
staging, to the tension between stillness and motion, to the powerful
(and sometimes overpowering) vocals. It’s a story of ennui and
desperation about three sisters and a hapless brother in 19th-century
Russia, but this production is immediate and alive.

The
studio theater of Reed College’s year-old performing arts building—a
space that would make many professional companies envious—has been
appointed as a provincial Russian drawing room: glass decanters of
vodka, botanical drawings, a jigsaw of patterned rugs, multiple ticking
clocks reminding us of the excruciatingly prosaic passage of time.
Bright turquoise scrims serve as the walls, like aqua-colored glasses
through which Chekhov’s despairing characters see the world outside
their country home.

Audience members take
seats throughout the parlor. For the first few minutes, actors move
about the space, touching up the room and—without words—beginning to
establish relationships. Oldest sister Olga (Lingafelter) oversees the
house with a gentle but firm hand; middle sister Masha (Cristi Miles)
scowls; Irina (Amber Whitehall), the youngest, flits around like a
child, oblivious to the hungry glares of Captain Solyony (Chris Murray).
As the house fills with friends and soldiers to celebrate Irina’s 20th
birthday, we’re not quite participants, but neither are we distant
observers in a darkened space. The actors can see our faces. We can
smell their hair pomade and see the dirt beneath their fingernails.

It’s
almost disappointing when the words come, but they quickly prove nimble
and poetic, even when the exchanges become, as Masha says,
“pseudo-conversations”: talk about the future that’s as paralyzed and
tedious and fickle as the characters themselves. This is a new
translation by director Stepan Simek, chairman of the theater department
at Lewis & Clark College, and it retains the crisp, somewhat
haphazard poetry of Chekhov’s dialogue while rendering the language
fresh—Masha, for example, describes their town as a “shithole.” (Some
updates are more distracting, as when the aging doctor talks about
“shtupping.” A convivial conga line set to “You Are My Sunshine” fares
surprisingly better.)

The staging changes
drastically for the production’s second half, when white scrims form the
walls of a small bedroom and we sit outside. Is it a cocoon? A cage? Or
is it just somewhat frustrating to watch actors’ faces as if through a
mosquito net?

It
would be easy for this to feel gimmicky, or for the performances to be
drowned out by novelty. But Simek’s choices feel neither arbitrary nor
heavy-handed, and the large ensemble cast mostly has the chops to make
the show work. There are hiccups: PETE relies heavily on gesture in its
work, but here the movements are sometimes too big or repetitive—arm
flailing, overdramatic brow-furrowing. Some of the best moments embrace
stillness, as when Irina, in her white dress and white fur cap, sits
partially reclined on the dining room table, like a stranded polar
mermaid. As Irina, Whitehall doesn’t create a wholly satisfying
character arc, and the babyish affect to her voice grows wearisome. But
Lingafelter and Miles, as the other sisters, give performances suffused
with soul and pain.

For
the final act, when we’re released from claustrophobia to an expansive,
open space, it comes as palpable relief. The sisters, meanwhile, remain
bound to their home, dreaming of an imagined wonderland—of Moscow—but
unable to escape.